Sunday, June 14, 2015

Something quickly: Stick a fan on it

One of the best ways to improve the overclocking capabilities of an AMD motherboard is to take the 70mm fan that came with your CPU. Unscrew the 4 screws attaching it to the heatsink and then attaching the fan over your VRM somehow(zipties). This may not sound like it will do much however forced airflow over a VRM heatsink can massively drop VRM temps which will eliminate throttling and will also significantly extend the life span of you motherboard. I recommend to run the fan above 3000 RPM to get a significant improvement. I recommend you also remove the IO plate to allow the air that the hot air from the VRM to get out of the case.
This also helps on Intel X79 boards and X99(not as much) boards. The LGA 1150 boards don't need to push all that much power so it's not really worth doing on those.